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One of my old work acquaintances, a truck driver, told me how he "upgraded his computer with the purple monkey". My eyes went wide, and before I can start saying anything he's all "omigod, what did i do!?".

I wonder how it's structured. Do they have people who's job is to take in news and content and make it searchable, so the writers can just ask for "romney bain jobs overseas" and get relevant clips with transcripts and everything? I mean yes, there's google, but if you had a database like that, and if it were up to date, it could seriously streamline the writing and production process. Which is important since you usually only have 24 hours to the next show.

This kind of stuff should be library of congress type shit where every politician in the nation has a freely available database of everything they said throughout the years. Librarians... they aren't just about books.

No, there is an actual company that produces a device that can search keywords in videos and they use it. I posted the website of the company like 4 years ago under a different username. I will try and find it.

But essentially you use this device and enter key words and it will search hundred of thousands of video clips for the key words.

I'm pretty sure there was an AMA on Reddit a year or two ago from a Daily Show intern. I remember he said a big part of their job was transcribing/indexing hours and hours of other newscasts that fed a big database.

Ahh but want more than that. Like they have stuff they pull up from years and years ago of some sound bite someone says that contradicts what they say now and do it all the time. It is kind of amazing they can find such random things over such a period of time.

Viacom claims. "They have raised your rates 52 percent in the last 7 years, while tripling their profit"

That's actually not as significant as what it would've been if DirectTV complied with Viacom's threat of keeping the channels for additional 30% higher price for every customer. Viacom will have you believe dropping those channels are a direct consequence of DirectTV's decision, but it is Viacom who continues to force network providers to jack up prices. After all, Viacom is the mass media company that OWNS Nickelodeon, MTV, MTV2, Comedy Central, BET, Spike, VH1, and so much more...

I watched the video from the DirecTV CEO, and I was a little confused. He derided Viacom for not letting his customers pay for only the Viacom channels they watch. Is DirecTV doing something radical with its programming or was this just extremely, almost laughably, hypocritical?

Actually, from what I can see here, you have it backwards.
Viacom wanted DirectTV to bump their prices up by 30%. DirectTV refused. Viacom still wants to force them into adopting their lucrative but customer-betraying plan.
The thing is, DirectTV can lose profit for adopting this plan, as customers can easily switch in and out of satellite T.V. However Viacom will most definitely profit from raising price of their television networks.

Think about it this way. Raise service price of, for example, Comcast. Viacom profits. Raise the price of DirectTV, and Viacom profits. None of the providers raise price, means no dramatic increase of profit for Viacom.As customers most likely switch back and forth between the service providers, the providers themselves, being directly correlated, will lose customers and therefore lose profit.

What it comes down to is Viacom keeps bumping up the prices here and there and they are bound to make profit as it continues up this high rise price tag

I should have clarified. I understand the whole DirecTV/Viacom battle, and I side with DirecTV as much as someone who has no horse in this race can. What I was pointing out was that the CEO of DirecTV was criticizing Viacom for not letting customers choose which channels they'd like to pay for when, I'm assuming, DirecTV does the exact same thing. If I subscribed to cable/satellite, I'd like to pay for AMC, Comedy Central, USA, TNT, ESPN and that's it. But no one sells that package, you have to buy 50 other channels that you don't want. So the DirecTV CEO was a pot calling the kettle black, in a big way, regardless of their current squabble.

okay, I think I understand more of what you're saying. you're saying you want only the channels you watch but why doesn't DirectTV allow that?

That's because the contracts companies engage in usually end up not buying just one individual items, but in bulks. Think of it as like buying a box of different mix of snacks. You might like chex mix, and oreos, but not doritos. Though, you still get it because it is cheaper in bulk

Here's what the battle is basically over: DirecTV wants to move certain programs to certain tiers. They want Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon in their basic tier and then Nick Jr. MTV 2 would be included in a more expensive tier where niche viewers who want it could pay for it. It's good for DirecTV because they can put the major channels in their Basic tier and charge less, thus having cheaper prices for their basic service and grabbing customers from Comcast, Time Warner, Dish etc. Each part of a subscriber's bill get's broken down by channel by your provider ..Comedy Central gets $1 per customer, MTV gets $.75 and channels like Nick Jr and MTV2 end up costing like 20 cents each (none of those are actual figures. They could all cost pancakes for all I fuckin' know. But that's not important) and that's how they figure out the most expensive part of what they are going to charge you. Its also why you'll notice not everyone gets History International or Military History or whatever, but nearly everyone gets the History Channel. It all depends on the deal your provider has worked out.

This isn't as profitable for Viacom. They want all of their channels to be in the basic tier so everyone is forced to have them and thus pay for every one of them. That means even if people don't give a shit and don't want to watch MTV3 or Nick Infant or whateverthefuck, they still have to pay for them and thus the prices for DirecTV's even most basic plan goes up. Usually when a company says "Ok, we will move these secondary channels to our basic tier...but since you're going to be getting a major bump in viewers, more money from our customers and more money from advertisers, we want a discount." which they usually agree with because the provider can get more channels at a discount compared to other companies, and although the broadcast company is making less than they would want, they still come out ahead. It’a a win-win situation...except in this case Viacom is pushing for even more. On top of forcing every one of their channels to be on the basic tier, Viacom also wants to charge 30% more than they already do. It might be $5 or $6 more per customer a month but DirecTV will lose business and added up it comes out to billions in costs to DirecTV. Viacom is holding DirecTV hostage and using the customers DirecTV is fighting for against them.

Also keep in mind that when this shit happens,you would think Dish, Time Warner or Comcast would be happy since all of those pissed off DirecTV customers will be looking to jump ship, right? Not so. They want DirecTV to win. They are watching carefully because they know they could be next...or even worse, if Viacom is successful it could inspire Disney to pull this shit. And that right there is the big fear. With Netflix and Hulu there are millions that have cable or satellite just for sports. Disney owns ESPN. And ESPNs monster contracts with the NFL, MLB, NHL, NASCAR etc make it the big kid on the block. ESPN already costs $5+ per subscriber, way more than any other channel...and if they decide to push their weight around that's bad bad news for everyone. Well, everyone except Disney.

This is also why, even though calble and sattelite companies would like to have ala carte programming it will never happen. Ala Carte programming would drive in a ton more customers, and people who have only ever had OTA TV would sign up in droves because they could get the 10-15 channels for something like $20 a month depending on the channels they want. But companies like Viacom will never let it happen. And it's the cable and satellite companies that end up getting the blame and wrath of the customers because that's where the bill comes from.

It can get a bit preachy or melodramatic, but otherwise it's a really good show. So far, it's kinda like how Aaron Sorkin wishes the news covered a lot of major events over the years. Definitely worth checking out.

I have quite a few friends working as Customer Service Reps (CSR) at DirecTV (The place pretty much runs the economy where I live haha). And it is correct that you may be able to get some good upgrades at this time. If you get a CSR that is decently competent at their job, you can ask what specials you apply for. These specials will be things that are either promotional or for your loyalty. And if you are near the end of your contract, that's when you can really get some good stuff if I'm not mistaken.

The big thing to keep in mind though is that, if you heard about a customer getting 'x' that doesn't automatically mean you can also get 'x'. The CSRs can only offer what they see on screen.

Jon Stewart is a GIGANTIC cash cow and Comedy Central is generally VERY relaxed on what the show does. Daniel Tosh even stated he was asked to "push the boundaries with his program" and i remember steven colbert in an interview making fun about him beeing able to say anything he wants on his show even including insulting the director of comedy central so i suppose Comedy Central is Jon's Bitch!

I used to watch the original Daily Show in high school and I loved Craig Kilborn. But when he moved to network TV, he just started to suck and I realized how much better Jon Stewart was than him. The direction of the show has drastically improved under his tenure, while Kilborn's career has tanked with failure after unfunny failure.

I remember when Kilborn left the show thinking "well, that's that for the daily show". Stewart came on, and it was really really awkward. He slowly euthanized off a few of the longstanding parts of the show (like "5 questions"), and changed the whole feel of things.

I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit. (people resist change, get off my lawn, all that jazz)

Then, surprisingly, I found myself still watching. And it was good. Really, really good. It went from funny, to funny -and- relevant. I'd have never guessed Jon Stewart would be such a pro in that chair, whoever made that hiring decision was a genius.

I never even bothered to try to follow Kilborn after I started to realize how much better Stewart was behind that desk. It doesn't surprise me that Kilborn's career ended up smacking wall after wall in the aftermath.

I think Key & Peele is hilarious. The slave skit especially. Had me dying of laughter. And the Lil Wayne parodies, the medical marijuana skit, the soul food skit, and well... a lot of things really. In a way, it reminds me of Chappelle's Show. Not on the same level of course, but it definitely reminds me of it.

Plus they know that some other network would pick him up in an instant and give him a show on which he could continue saying whatever he wanted about them, possibly even more harshly. If you are going for the demographic that Viacom is with Comedy Central then you don't want Jon Stewart to have a problem with you.

I think ComCen is being run by some savvy guys; savvy enough to know that Stewart and Colbert have the power to create a very nasty PR disaster for them if they try to impose some corporate bullshit. They've probably also got someone whose job it is to smooth out/deflect anything that upper management might get pissy at.

They get these great shows, tease them onto their network, then proceed to fuck them up in every kind of way they can, and then after a distressingly short period of time of poor ratings due to the incredibly numerous ways they've tried to fuck the show up, they throw up their arms in dismay "Fuck it, series cancelled!"

I was a bit surprised too. I mean given how timid The Daily Show's response was to SOPA, I would have thought Viacom had them more by the balls. But I guess The Daily Show really just cared more about this than they did about SOPA.

Of course they do. What did they say, 20 million people affected by the viacom blackout? Even if only one in ten DirectTV subscribers watch The Daily Show, that's a big fucking chunk of viewership lost. It directly affects their ability to make money.

Well, to be fair, I did have to watch an ad before I watched the show telling me how evil Direct TV is and to STAND UP and DEMAND my channels. haha. It tickles me that people haven't cut the cord on these greedy bastards yet.

I can understand how it can remove banner adds from the HTML data you receive when you go to look at a website, but how does it stop video ads? Magic!?

The way I always thought most video ads worked is that they didn't give any of the data from the actual video you requested to see until the ad has finished playing, so either Adblock is ripping the data off their servers like wizard ninjas, or it's somehow tricking the site into thinking we already watched the ad.

If the commercial is part of the video, it would be very hard to Adblock to cut it out.

Thankfully most media players do something like "Give me an ad to play... Okay... Ready for the video." That's where Adblock comes in, it either changes the code to only request the video, block the ad and hope the media player just moves on to the video, or gets fancy and hands the media player a 1 second ad clip to fake it.

Not sure what adblock does for each one, but these are the techniques used in similar technogies like Pandora music downloading proxies.

This incident has me seriously considering ditching cable/satellite entirely, and just streaming everything. I seem to recall that Comcast and Dish both had flaps like this with different media companies (or maybe it was also Viacom), although this one has gone way further.

I just need to figure out what I need to do to stream everything I want, in HD, to three TVs in the house, with onscreen remotes. Somebody point me in the right direction.

I don't get it. If they can't show the ads about demanding that DirecTV give the channels back on DirecTV, who are the ads for? I have DirecTV, so I really don't know. Had it installed less than a week before this shit started. I was pissed.